Archive for the ‘Security’ Category

If your website is running on an Apache server, its very easy to restrict access to a folder to only yourself or a select few people. This is very useful if parts of your site are not yet fully operational, or if you want to run a small “beta”. (more…)

I found this neat trick the other day… If you notice someone is trying to hack your website, or just would rather a certain individual not stop by anymore, its very easy to ban the offender if you’re using Apache as your webserver. (more…)

I submitted a story to 2600 magazine in the summer of 2005 about a shady technique for getting pageviews called “Googlejacking”. The story was accepted, and I received a few issues of the mag, a shirt, and a bit of internet fame in the coming months.

For those of you who don’t have an IV needle in to the internet like I do, googlejacking is a technique using either a HTML 302 redirect or a META REFRESH to redirect from one page to another. When you performed the redirect from your site to a target site, YOUR REDIRECT LINK (for example, “http://www.iswapyou.com/redirect.php?www.cnn.com”) would be published by google, msn live search, Ask Jeeve’s, or any other search engines spiders instead of the destination link. If you find out that this is happening you can then steal all of the search engine traffic from your redirections destination (!), as described in the article.

Response to my previous two posts about Cracking YouTube has been amazing . Thanks to everyone in the community for the amazingly intelligent discussion that this has spawned, and for all of the high quality responses/comments to the original posts! Keep it up guys, it helps me tremendously and allows me to write more interesting articles like this.

No one has contacted me yet indicating that the technique in part 2 should NOT work by pointing out a hole in the logic. This makes sense, because…

YouTube closed the browser refresh hack… mostly, but not quite. If you take the code i posted before and add the SwitchProxy firefox plugin to switch your IP, you can still rack up a ton of views. SwitchProxy has a setting to automatically switch the proxy you are using – you can…